Believe it or not, I've never actually made a tree using alphas before. After a bit of research about how best to go about this, I decided to take a crack at it, build my tree and then try a Max script called SlideNormalThief. The idea with this script is that it will transfer the normals from one object to another, thus enabling oneself to even out the direction of normals across the entire surface of the tree canopy. The first screenshot is my tree with the reference object for the canopy overlaid on it.
Second screenshot is the vanilla plum tree, as it is with the standard normal.
Third screenshot is the plum tree with averaged normals.
Is it just me, or does the second screenshot look significantly better than the first?
After some consideration, I decided that actually, it looked better without altered normals. Experiment failed, but lessons learned. Anyway, here are my other tree trunks! They're awaiting their foliage.
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